Exhibits

Free and open to the public, from 10 am to 4 pm weekdays at CHAT, 10th floor of Gladfelter Hall, 1115 W Berks St., Philadelphia, PA. For inquiries, call CHAT at 215/204-6386 or email CHAT@temple.edu.

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Sherrie Nickol

Crowdscapes

Sept. 3 — Dec. 18, 2009
CHAT Gallery
10th floor of Gladfelter Hall
M-F, 10 am — 4 pm

Sherrie Nickol searches for the interconnection between groups of people and their surroundings. The emotional interaction among the subjects that populate these places is central to this body of work. Nickol’s insightful photographs lead her viewers to a larger understanding of the meaning of ‘crowds.’

Additional information ...

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Glorious Commerce: Exhibitionary Strategies of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, 1893-1926

In 1893 University of Pennsylvania professor William Wilson founded the Philadelphia Commercial Museum and built a collection including most of the objects from the World’s Fairs’ displays.  The Museum had two goals: to help American businesses prevail in foreign markets; and to impress upon the general public that commercial expansion was a lucrative alternative to military imperialism.

To meet these goals, Wilson’s exhibition strategy arranged objects either according to type or region of production, strategies meant to explain both what was available for purchase and where objects could be bought and sold.

Wilson believed that by cultivating markets in underdeveloped regions, he could widen the United States’ sphere of influence. Each of the cases in Glorious Commerce reflect one of Wilson’s exhibitionary strategies in order to highlight the role of museum collection and display in the discursive production of “other” places and cultures.

Glorious Commerce includes materials from both the Temple Anthropology Lab’s permanent collection and the Philadelphia City Archives. CHAT would like to thank Jessica Winegar, Gordon Gray, Muriel Kirkpatrick, and Brooke Bocast of Temple’s Anthropology department for displaying the exhibit in our lounge. 

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Ben Wilson, American Painter

In 2008, CHAT aquired six large oil paintings by American painter Ben Wilson thanks to the generosity of the Ben and Evelyn Wilson Foundation. These works are on permanent display in the CHAT lounge. (Image: a detail from “The Thresher,” c. 1975)